Comment by amjoshuamichael
10 days ago
I don't think that the developers of Slay The Spire were taught by complexity loving professors, no. But education does more than influence the people at universities. Education informs norms, traditions, and styles that permeate through industries. An example from outside tech: the music notation app Finale found a strangle hold on the education market, and now it's one of the standards for notation, despite being the worst option (source: have you tried Finale?).
I've never played the game, but my understanding is that Slay the Spire largely impresses on a design and artistic front, not a technical one. Its engine requirements were not based on feature set or code quality, but on what developers knew. So they probably picked Unity because it was ubiquitous. Education starts the problem, and then devs who need something common they care hire for continue the problem. I don't blame devs for this, it's the right choice to make and obviously Slay the Spire is great, but I am saying that this is a force that drives down the quality of game engines.
No, they started with a code only framework (my beloved LibGDX) and then moved to Unity/Godot for the sequel for pragmatic reasons. See my other comment.
Being ubiquitous was part of the decision, yes, because it means there are many high quality plugins instantly integratable which is a huge time-saver.
Fair, though when I say "quality decline" I'm mostly talking about extraneous useless features and overly complicated node-based architectures that require GUIs. There are simpler ways to do all of this stuff. This engine, Tramway, is proof of that. Godot sits somewhere in the middle, I've used it a little but I don't know enough about it to say whether it's overly complex or not.
You are correct: I definitely agree that not all gamedevs should be making stuff from scratch, but I also think that Unity is a little too much. There's a good middle ground somewhere slightly above raylib.
My argument is that the promotion of engines that live near this middle ground is blocked by education: people who want to be able to sell long courses to the people who look up "how to make a video game."